Patri Forwalter-Friedman
11/22-12/5
Table of Contents
Well, we all have a face, that we hide away forever,
and we take it out and show ourselves, when everyone has gone.
Some are satin, some are steel, some are silk, and some are leather,
They're the faces of the stranger, and we love to try them on.
Billy Joel, "The Stranger"
As usual, it was idle Web browsing that caused his problem. It had happened before. The time he found the amateur anarchist site, tried to "make powerful, safe explosives out of common household ingredients" and ended up losing his eyebrows and enough hair that he had to shave his head. The time he stumbled on the support page for the Medical Marijuana Initiative (while looking for pages with the keywords `pot', `weed', `grass', `drugs', `stoned', `gimme some of that yum-yum') and spent weeks collecting signatures. The Web was an ocean, and as a college student Grant had beachfront property. A nice swim every now and then never hurt, but he had a tendency to go a little far, and his friends worried that someday a current might drag him out and he'd never come back.
It was a school day, and Grant was playing around on his Linux box as usual, avoiding what little homework he had as a computer science major at a state university.
"Dude! Look at these dumbasses!" he cackled. "Yo Jay! Check this shit out!"
His roommate slowly turned another page of his o-chem book and sighed: "They shouldn't let little people like you play with big complicated machines like that."
Either his efforts were a failure, or whatever juvenile humour was entrancing Grant had raised him above responding to such simple jibes, for he ignored the comment and replied "Man, you gotta check this out, its fucking hilarious. I accidentally found it looking for some random words."
Jay tossed aside his book, crossed the room and leaned over Grant's shoulder. Netscape was loaded as always, and occupied a prominent position on the screen.
"Its some family's homepage, what the fuck's so funny? Or are you just amused that so many people who have no clue about computers, and gain no real benefit from their use, still revel in having webpages?" Jay questioned acerbically.
"While that too amuses me, it ain't what I'm laughing about. Why don't you take a moment from your busy analysis to actually READ the page, and maybe you'll get it."
The room was silent for a moment, except for the fast rhythmic thumping of breakbeat hardcore dance/trance ambientelectronic funk from the room on one side, and the slower rhythmic pounding of two or more people exploring the freedom of college from the room on the other side. "Quiet" was, for Jay and Grant, a mythical state - their best approximation was those moments when their music overpowered the external noises.
As Jay read the page, he grew increasingly puzzled. "Are they serious? Is this for real? It looks almost like a joke, but it isn't well enough done to be a satire. These people are so naïve, they don't have a clue about the net. Listen to this:
`We live in a comfy cabin in the Lake Watotaunga area, called the Larson Family Nest, or just "The Nest". Its remote, so we aren't tainted by civilization. No shooting (unless I'm hunting), no stealing, no weird people. Just our little family and God. We drive into town every now and then for supplies, of course - no man is an island.' And so on, in nauseating detail. They want to be untainted, and they put up a fucking web page. Hey, they got two daughters! Sheeeeeiit! Click on one of their subpages. Yeah, the sixteen-year old, Jennifer!"
The two sat enthralled as they read page after page and emitted laugh after laugh. Some were mere chuckles, from the throat, while others were deep belly laughs, rumbling, tumbling, sometimes verging on the hysterical. Laughter was not all the page drew from them - there were sighs, exclamations, and a multitude of fake gagging noises. The Larson Family Homepage was a beautiful mixture of naiveté , stupidity, self-righteousness and country quaintness - it was at once heartwarming and repulsive, epitomizing the best and worst of America.
Their voyage had been one of discovery, of exploration. They had been passive observers, watching, not interacting. But the nature of the net allows far more than observation, it provides facilities for interaction, and this fact was to profoundly affect one member of the Larson Family. Finally bored with the cascade of rustic tripe, Grant clicked back to something that had caught his eye on Jennifer's subpage.
"Jen's Dad: If you want to send e-mail to Jennifer, click here. Remember that we are placing a lot of trust in all of you, and I hope you justify it. She is a nice, intelligent, interesting young woman who does not know that much about the world. Please, no perverts or freaks, there are other sites for your kind.
Jen: Dad's fussy, but don't mind him, he means well. I would really like to talk to someone fun, I love it here, but its lonely. So please write!"
"Hey man, how can I resist an appeal like that? I've never tried to corrupt someone over the net before, this could be fun! Didn't it say on one of those pages that she's blonde? I love blondes!"
Jay walked back to his side of the room, and sat down. "Have a heart, man, that sounds lower than even your usual" He was a little worried - Grant was a nice guy at heart, but he had always liked the innocent ones best, and after that incident with the prospective student first semester, he was specifically forbidden by the administration from any sort of communication - verbal, interdisciplinary, or otherwise - with visiting high-schoolers. Not that she had minded, but word got back to the administration, and if her parents had found out...that wasn't the reputation the University wanted. There was an aura of charm about Grant - he could switch in a moment from homeboy to professor, from sentences that used "fuck" every few words to the kind of gratuitous multisyllabism that made parents think "Gee, he sounds so intelligent". He had empathy, and an easy way of talking and listening, that made people feel comfortable. He also relished explosives, drugs, ghetto rap, and a variety of other antisocial hobbies. He was an enigma, different things to different people. Jay often wondered what Grant was to himself.
Grant was oblivious to Jay's brief re-appraisal of his personality, although he could sense his roommate's worry from across the room. Time to have some fun. He loaded his mail program, and pondered the blinking cursor. He wanted something that would draw her out without raising her parent's suspicions. He wanted to know more about her without revealing too much of himself. The tone had to be carefully constructed. And of course, the most important question was: What role should he play? Lets see...he should stay a college student, to make things easier. But how to justify his interest? How about pretending to be a country boy himself! Grant pictured himself driving a jacked-up pickup, a shotgun in one hand, a Daisy Duke type woman in another, and a beer in the third. Hey, it was a fantasy, why limit himself to two hands? Did he need some more for the steering wheel? No, the car was steered psychically of course. Enough of that - time to think about his assumed identity. He decided that he was home-schooled by his parents, along with a brother and sister. They had lived in a remote cabin in the Sierra's, although one with a satellite dish and an internet connection. He had become an expert at computers from his house, and at sixteen had left for college to learn computer science. Grant was confident that his imagination would provide the details when necessary.
Grant wrote the letter, doing his best to play the role he had designed. Attention span exhausted, he turned to other things, things involving alcohol, operating systems, cheap mexican food, cannabis sativa, the theory of computation, cough syrup, and cellular automata. But not all at the same time. Thus occupied, he drifted through the afternoon and evening, forgetting about the e-mail that was such an unimportant part of his life.
The next day, when he returned from his afternoon classes, he (as usual) turned on the stereo and sat at his computer to read email. "Jen Larson? Isn't that the chick from the webpage?", he mused aloud. Jay wasn't around, so his rhetorical question hung in the air unanswered. He went through his messages in order, and eventually got to Jen's. "Shit! It really is her! She must really be lonely, to answer that fast." Her letter began:
"Dear Grant:
I am so glad to have met a friend like you! Most of the e-mail i get is from annoying computer geeks, or weirdos, or old people. Your letter really stood out - you are close to my age, and don't seem like too much of a nerd. :) (smiley, but you probably knew that). Even my parents liked your letter! Don't worry, i don't let them read all my mail - especially the weird ones, i just delete those (dad would get so mad! He is a doofus.) ;) (wink) I love making computer faces! But anyway, your letter was so nice, i had to show them."
and continued for a while in a similar vein, answering Grant's questions and replying with a few of her own. Yes, she liked school, she had skipped a couple grades and was a senior, yes she did well, her favorite subject was biology, she loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian. No, she didn't know that much about computers or programming, but she loved to play solitaire and minesweeper. Yes, she wanted to go to college. No, she hadn't decided where to apply yet. Yes, she had been to big cities, but only a few times as a teenager, on school field trips and such. As to what it was like living in such a little family:
"i dunno, its always been like this. i was homeschooled for a while, now i go the high school that's a half-hour away. I guess there are a lot of people i could talk to there, but they are so different! Lots of farmers kids and stuff, and most of them are so dumb! i mean, i guess they can't help it, but still. they all act like school is so hard, and they just want to finish it so they can go to work or to jail or something. There are a few smart ones and i talk to them some, but i come from such a different background. People who aren't Larsons never seem to understand. *sigh*. i like my parents and my sister a lot. My sister and i are best friends, she is only two years younger, so we do everything together. Without her i would be really lonely."
She asked a lot of questions about college - what were the dorms like, were classes hard, did people party a lot. Grant re-read her letter carefully, analyzing her as he did professors, acquaintances, and figures of authority. What made her tick? What were her dreams, hopes, fears, idiosyncrasies, pet peeves? He decided to wait a day or two to reply - best not to let her know that he was, as it happened, just as bored as her.
Over the following weeks, the unlikely pair corresponded regularly. Jen wrote of the little triumphs and despairs of a teenager: the test that went badly, the test that went well, the teacher who put her down, the one who nurtured her, her parents getting mad about something she was reading on the Web, and a great homepage she found about how to choose a college. She was vivacious and intelligent, but her knowledge of the world was oddly patchworked, as one would expect from her upbringing. She was an expert on horse diseases, but seemed to think that alcohol induced psychotic behavior in doses as small as a beer. Most of what she knew came from TV or the net, neither of which did very well at explaining how the real world worked. There was school, of course, but her unusual status there prevented her from really weaving herself into the social fabric. Grant explained term after term of college slang to her, always couched as innocently as possible. His conversations with her were free from profanity, except for the occasional "damn" which he used when emotional.
Grant continued playing the role he had designed for himself, but as time went by, he found himself saying more of what he really felt. Jen was a good listener, and an intelligent responder, when her colossal ignorance did not interfere. She had read a lot, but had a definite dearth of real-world experience. She was a friend completely outside his social group, who did not have any preconceived notions about who he was (except, of course, the ones he planted). He had thought his behavior at college was his "real self", but he began to realize that it was just another mask - easy to wear, and transparent in places - but one that he was beginning to outgrow. The idea scared him. Like all teenagers, he had spent years striving for identity, and the result - conceived in high school, then poured and hardened in the forge of his freshman year - had kept him happy for a while. He was so used to wearing it, he hadn't realized it was beginning to grow heavy. What frightened him most was that he had no idea what lay underneath - his inner self was a formless void of desires, dreams, principles, and base impulses, as inappropriate to show in public as pictures of grandchildren.
Self-doubt aside, Grant's manipulative impulses were still being given free reign. While he was opening up to Jen about his doubts and fears, he was searching for information. With subtle questioning, he found out where she went to school, where she lived, and even tried to get her to a send a picture, on the pretext that he could scan it, and she could put it up on her family's webpage. Grant entertained no illusions about the likelihood of her father letting her put up a picture of herself, but he hoped the idea would get him what he wanted, so he used it.
His initial contact had been fueled by boredom and idle manipulative curiosity. As their exchanges became more important to him, enjoyment was a factor as well, but his romantic side was not yet strong enough to cause action, and other motivations were needed. Grant was a puppet master, and the puppet he naturally knew best how to control was himself. His subconscious had suggested lust as a reason to continue the correspondence, and so obtaining a picture became important - he had to know whether all this was worth it. Unfortunately, Jen had seemed curiously reluctant, and after a while Grant had stopped asking - the request began to seem out of place. He contented himself with his imagination of her as a statuesque blonde, perhaps a cross between Kim Basinger, Claudia Schiffer, and Pamela Anderson. For the first couple weeks, he had printed out their e-mail and taped it up by his door, for the enlightenment and amusement of passers-by. As his messages became less an artifice of his role, and more a curious blend of his public, private, and assumed personalities, this practice ended - much to the relief of Jay, who had been mortified by Grant's callousness.
Grant begain to really depend on his e-mail to Jen as an outlet for all his frustration about the cliquish, caste-bound society at school and his self-appointed role in it. Like the poetry class he had taken the previous year, some of the usenet groups he contributed to regularly, and a precious few other things, his correspondence with Jen was something he could really pour his emotions into.
A few weeks into the correspondence, Grant and Jay were sitting idly in their room, as was their wont, shooting the breeze about nothing and everything. Jay had noticed the shift in his roommate's attitude towards Jen. She was becoming less and less an object of mockery, and more a sympathetic ear. Grant tended to avoid questions about her, and had even lied to one of his friends who'd been following the whole thing for humour, saying that he'd gotten bored and dropped the correspondence. His friend had been greatly disappointed - he'd been talking about setting up stupid-hick-l, a mailing list onto which all of the e-mail would be put, and where people could make suggestions as to what Grant should do next. Grant seemed to be almost regretting his subterfuge - he'd even complained once, when he seemed in a particularly vulnerable mood, that it was a pain in the ass pretending to be someone else, and he wished he could talk to her about the problems he had that couldn't be cast into the mountain-raised computer prodigy mold. Then he had smiled wickedly and said "of course, then we'd have deprived ourselves of all that fun in the beginning."
Jay was worried that although the relationship was improving, Grant still didn't think of her as a real person. She had been upgraded from an object of mockery to a listening service, but she still wasn't real. When they talked about her, it was as though she was an object to be moved, a game to be played, a shiny new Java applet which was fun to play with but really just some lines of code. As long as their only connection was filtered by the impersonal internet, their thoughts and emotions reduced to ascii characters, she would never be real. Perhaps...
"Hey Grant. Don't you think its time to take this whole 'Jen' game to the next level?" said Jay, looking knowingly at Grant.
"What do you mean?" said Grant, looking annoyed. He wished everyone else would forget about this stupid joke, so he could use Jen the way he wanted too. He was beginning to feel sort of bad about the whole thing, and this sounded suspiciously like more humour at Jen's behalf. Althoug Jay had always been on her side...
Jay continued. "Well, anyone can fool someone over e-mail. You know, its easy when they can't see you. Why don't you meet her? That would be a real challenge - getting her to meet you in the real world."
Grant thought about it for a moment. It might be fun to actually meet her, and what if she really was good-looking? mmm....Of course, it made everything so much more dangerous, but he was not one to shirk at danger! This could be fun. He began to experience the thrill of a possible game in sight. He pictured meeting her, bringing flowers, whispering soothing words of romance. He was suave, and she was stupid.
As he saw the light begin to come on behind Grant's (appropriately) grey eyes, Jay wondered if he was doing the right thing, if this would be more dangerous to poor Jennifer Larson than having Grant just be a ghostly correspondent. But he had faith, in his heart, that Grant was an ok guy, that if he could only force him to realize that Jen was a real person, things would be alright. He said conspiratorily, to draw Grant in further:
"Of course, it raises the difficult strategic issue of the parents: To subvert or circumvent? The former makes it easier to meet her in formal settings - dinner, movie, whatever - but then they get to keep an eye on you. And what if they see through you?"
"Unlikely. Drunk, high, and bleeding from failed attempts to break through a wall with my head, I could convince those rustic peons that everything was fine. Its all about the aaaart of the-ah-tra." With a vaguely effeminate hand wave, Grant dismissed Jen's parents as players in the game. No, the real playfield was behind those (hopefully) lovely locks of hers, the squares of the board etched on her cerebrum, the pieces beliefs and emotions. Lake Watotaunga was two or three hours away. How to justify a visit?
Then Jay played his trump, to make sure Grant didn't turn this whole thing into one of his little games. He had sensed the soft spot in Grant's heart, and now he would apply pressure.
"And think how much easier it'll be to explain who you really are in person, so you can talk without having to be someone else."
The moment froze. The glimmer of manipulative joy that Grant had felt suddenly hardened, became brittle, shattered into pieces of glass which pricked him in a million tiny places. In his vision, she hurled the flowers at his feet, and then begin to sob. She didn't really know him. His stomach descended through his intestines like a heavy express elevator with its cable cut as he contemplated actually seeing she whom he had deceived. It wouldn't be a game anymore. It would be...
He looked up at Jay, realizing some of what his roomate had intended. By making him imagine Jen in the flesh, he had almost made her seem real, worthy of being guilty over. But of course, she wasn't, and nothing would (or should) change that. The memory of that tiny instant of pain, just after Jay's cruel reminder that time with Jen would just be another lie, and before he had banished the whole image in self-defense, hardened his resolve. He would never let that happen. He said to Jay, bitterly:
"Fuck you. Just..fuck you, alright? I never want to meet her. NEVER!"
He turned and stomped out of the room, leaving Jay wishing he'd been a little subtler. At least he had made his point.
Grant inhaled slowly and deeply, letting the life-giving force enter his lungs. Too quickly, and the power would sear his throat, too slowly and he would not get enough. His eyes were closed, watching phantasmal shapes flicker and dance on his eyelids, and his entire body pulsed with the jungle rhythm of his heart. It felt like the world resonated with him in syncopated time: boom-BOOM boom-BOOM boom-BOOM. When he reached the capacity of his unhappy lungs, he passed the object in his left hand to the person on his right, and held his breath, letting the magic disperse throughout his body. Eventually, when the time was right and all was well with his world, he breathed out, and then took several quick shallow breaths to re-oxygenate himself. He was getting toward the next plateau, where things were not just kinda funky, but truly, fundamentally, different, where time was an amorphous entity that had little relation to "self" or "movement", where hunger was an all-consuming passion. Damn, this was some good shit!
"Hey Grant, don't you have any better smoking music?" A voice from the other world, the one outside his body, interrupted his reverie. "Like the Dead, or Phish, or Bob Marley or something. Dude, even Cyprus Hill or rap would do right now. This techno shit is givin me bad vibes. I got a bad-ass marijuana mix tape upstairs. Hey, why are we in your room anyway? Don't you usually come smoke with us?"
Grant opened his eyes, and saw, as though through a thick wavy pane of glass, a small circle of people sitting in a smoky room. The room was oddly familiar, he was comfortable there, it felt right. He turned his consciousness to the question he had just been asked, but before he could gather his scattered wits to reply, someone more in touch with reality answered. "That country chick he's been leading on by e-mail told him to wait here, she was going to send him something important tonight. Wow, Grant being kept at home on a Friday night by someone he's never met. Fucking amazing."
Stoned or not, Grant's ego couldn't let a blow like that by, and as usual, it decided the best response to a put-down was to humiliate a helpless target. In his befuddled state, his reply came out as a string of garbled redneck jokes: "Hey, she's a good runner, maybe she's still a virgin! She doesn't have any male cousins, so her parents don't know what to do with her. I asked her if the family had a pickup, and she didn't know there were other kinds of cars. I asked if her dad owned a shotgun, and she said yeah but just one . . . for each room." It was well below his usual comedic standard, but enough to make his audience roll in laughter. Of course, in their state the arrival of the Texas Chainsaw Murderer would have had much the same effect, but his ego was satisfied, and went back to watching his id and superego melt into formless shapes and emit colored sparks. Grant had had enough for the nonce, and so he wandered over to his bed, a long and tedious journey whose intricacies would take volumes to explain. As he settled down onto its inviting downy softness and began to trace the quilted lines of his comforter with disturbing fascination, a sound entered the room.
"Did everyone else just hear something? I'm not just hearin' things, right? Why are you all looking at me?" said Steve, who lived a few doors down the hall. Jay, who was one of the more sober individuals replied: "I think someone knocked. Lemme look through the peephole."
"Hey Grant, you bitch, maybe its your woman. Or should I say - girl. Once you break her in, you'll pass her around, right?" said Steve, to the general amusement of the room. While Grant would normally have found the misogynistic comment amusing, he felt uncharecteristically protective towards Jen. It was one thing if he insulted her, but Steve was different. Unfortunately, before he could compose an appropriately withering reply, Jay said "What the fuck? It looks like two parents and a daughter. She's a cute blonde, looks like a prospective. We weren't supposed to have any - oh, shit. Grant!" With the phenomenal presence and poise to be found only in the sober, instead of panicking or letting them in, he yelled out the door "One minute!" Several bloodshot pairs of eyes swiveled to look at Grant, who normally enjoyed the limelight, but now even the thought of lime made his stomach queasy. "No. You're kidding. Jay, this isn't funny! This isn't fucking funny! I'm stoned out of my mind, this isn't fucking funny! You're serious. She's here with her parents. FUCK! fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck bugger bloody bastard shit shit shit shit!", Grant cursed unimaginatively.
"Pull yourself together! Weren't you bragging last week about how easily you could fool anyone, in any state of mind? All the worlds a stage, and this is your cue."
"Oh, fuck it!" replied Grant. With events in the outside world to occupy his attention, he moved a step closer to reality. "Why do I even care? She just a game that's over now. Words, turned into ASCII, encoded in IP packets, stuffed into TCP packets, coming for me to read. It was a joke, that's all. Who has the bong?"
Jay had reached the limit of his patience. He had been worrying about something like this for weeks, rehearsing the confrontation, planning his verbal barrage in exquisite detail. He ached at the chance to rip his roommate apart, to feel superior, to demonstrate his mastery of vituperation. But in the heat of the moment, his lines were lost, his carefully crafted wit abandoned, and his anger manifested as a jumbled stream of adjectives. "You pathetic, manipulative, objectifying, self-satisfied, misogynistic, destructive unfeeling uncaring ASSHOLE!"
"JAY! JAY! SHUT UP!" screamed Grant. Then he remembered the thin dorm door that seperated him from what must not become real, and quieted.
Smoke swirled and silence descended as the strained vocal cords of the antagonists recovered. Grant continued, in a more normal tone of voice: "She isn't a person. This is a game. Just a game. I did it for fun. She isn't real to me, she can't be real to me. That's one of the wonderful things about the internet, it adds a layer of abstraction to everything. How can I see as a person someone who exists, to me, as a mere interactive stream of data? So what if that data is words, ideas, whatever. Its just a bunch of 1's and 0's, nothing to get upset about."
The fateful knocking sound came again from the door, giving the lie to Grant's obsessive denial of the obvious. His attention moved from Jay to focus on the door and the knock hit him like a blow. The world wavered and shook, from the shock as much as the weed.
"She's here. She's really here. They're real. Its like seeing a graph instead of reading an equation, or going somewhere you've only read about. Her physical presence has done what no amount of e-mail could have: forced me to admit her humanity, her existence as an individual. Why do I get so philosophical when I'm stoned? Wait, why are you all staring at me? Who was I talking about? Oh shit, Jen's here! Jay, what the fuck am I gonna do?"
Jay took a deep breath, and replied: "You have to perform. You have to be sober. They've driven all this way, I don't think they'll be satisfied with a "He doesn't feel well." You wanted a chance to meet her, didn't you?" He looked around at the smoky room, the circle of stoners, and the random things Grant had lying around, and said "I don't think this room is going to do. Climb out of the window, and go to the library. Thank god we're on the ground floor. I'll tell them you are studying there because you don't like being around when we get high. YOU need to act normal! And dammit, I'm only doing this because I don't want her to get hurt."
With the enigmatic combination of reason and irrationality that is the hallmark of the stoned, Grant said "Thanks Jay. I owe you one. If only my teeth would stop vibrating.", and opened the window. As he left, a rush of smoke followed, perhaps impelled by a desire to see his performance. If so, it was disappointed, for he headed towards the academic end of campus, and it was caught in a passing updraft. Jay closed the window, preventing any more smoke from escaping, and finally, several minutes after the first knock, opened the door.
Despite his desire to be modern and unimpressed with physical appearance, his need to analyze the people in front of him in order to best carry out his goal of preventing hurt to the innocent, the only thought that his mind could hold for the first few seconds was: "God she's beautiful!". To his credit, the thought did not last, it was quickly dispelled by others, crowding upon each other, "She's so young", "Look at that skin", "Why is she beautiful?", "thank god Grant took down those printed emails", and "She glows." With a conscious effort, he forced himself to dam up the flood of thoughts, and turn his attention to the task at hand. Act. He must act.
"Hey man, what's goin' on? You people prospective students or something? We didn't get notice about you."
The Larson family blanched visibly as the odor from the room burst free from its confinement and assaulted them on its way down the hall. The expressions on the parents faces suggested they knew what it was, but before they could speak, Jen turned and said quickly in a low tone: "Don't worry, I, uh, don't think that's him." She then focused her attention back on Jay, who looked pleased to have it so bestowed. "Hi, you must be Jay. I'm Jen, a friend of Grant's. Do you have any idea where he is?" The last sentence was said with an undertone that indicated she sincerely hoped he was not in the room, that in fact she would almost be more happy if he were in jail or at a whorehouse or on a drug smuggling run than if he were in the room.
Jay replied "Oh, yeah, I think he like, mentioned you a bunch. He was gonna be around tonite, I think cause of some mail he was supposed to get or something, but, dude, we all decided to smoke out here, and he doesn't like being around that sort of thing, so like, dude, I think he's studying in the library or someplace geeky like that. You want some weed?" He summoned up all his memories from two years of living with Grant, and gave Jen a stoned leer that would have done the master proud. She politely declined both the verbal offer of drugs and the facial offer of other things, each on its own level, and asked for directions to the library. Jay complied, and told them a route that would take a few minutes longer than necessary, hoping it would give Grant a chance to pull himself together. He also gave a brief description of what Grant was wearing, so they could find him when they got there.
While he was talking, he looked at Jen, and wondered why she was so attractive. It was the skin, he supposed - it was suffused with a radiant glow, a milky softness that begged to be touched. She had straight blonde hair which cascaded over her shoulders, and high cheekbones that emphasized the purity of her cyan eyes. Her smile crinkled the corners of her mouth and dimpled her cheeks. As she thanked him and left, his analytical mind considered her beauty, her parents, and her upbringing, and suddenly had an uncomfortable guess as to why Grant was important enough for the Larsons to come here. Goddamn him! The fool knew his power to charm, but would he realize his power to hurt? As Jay entered his room and closed the door, his dominant thought was an overwhelming sense of sorrow for Jen Larson.
Grant found his way to the library easily - he'd had a lot of practice doing things while stoned - but the trip seemed to take forever. His conscious mind knew this was just an effect of his state, but he couldn't help worrying about his rate of progress. He looked behind and around himself constantly, searching for a group of three people who didn't fit in. As usual on a friday night, there were a fair number of students around the dormitories, but as he moved towards the academic side of campus, things quieted down. When he got to the library, he made his way immediately to the bathroom. He scrubbed his hands and face thoroughly, trying to remove as much of the stench of his activities as possible, with mixed results. His body smelled normal, but his clothes were still impregnated with smoke, and there was naught he could do to change that. How to remove the smell? Or explain it away perhaps...think, asshole, think! He briefly contemplated the little blue thing in a urinal, but decided it had no place in his plan. Oh well, he'd just say he'd been there when his roommate started smoking.
He left the bathroom, and found his way to an area of the library close to the entrance, where he had an unobstructed view of everyone who entered and left. After having carefully chosen his position and seat, he realized he had no books or papers to pretend to study. He glanced around, and saw several books lying on nearby tables - the spoor of lazy students. He picked one at random, opened it to a random page, and watched the doorway. As he sat, he tried to concentrate on being normal, but maintaining a simple linear stream of thought was impossible. He seemed to be thinking about everything and nothing, like someone caught in the throes of a Zen Buddhist phase. With his eyes open, the world just looked weird, but when he closed them, he became a colored spark floating in a hyperbolic space of flickering lights. He wrenched himself away from the majestic spectacle, and tried to focus on the doorway.
As the out-of-place family followed their indirect instructions towards the library, it was clear that all was not well among the Larsons. As they passed the dormitories, Jen's father was shaking his head at the loud music, the obvious influence of alcohol, and the spectacle as a whole - in short, college kids daring to have fun. He was obviously gathering ammunition for his battle to convince the female contingent that Jen shouldn't go to college, or at least not live there. Jen was tracing the route they were following in her head, and wondering why it was so circituitous. She marked it up to Jay's obvious stonedness, but something was still not quite right. Why had it taken so long for Grant's door to open? And despite the pulsating beat of the music from his room, she had thought, that...well...she almost heard...screaming? Ah well, she had little experience with drugs or partying teenagers, she shouldn't expect to understand everything. After all, this was college.
"I still don't see why we're here, Marj." said Mr. Larson to his wife. As usual, he was complaining because things were not perfectly to his liking. "Why didn't we invite him over for dinner or something? Or at least warn him that we were coming! How do we know he isn't busy, or, sick, or, or...Did you see those kids? Did you SMELL them? Damned self-destructive druggies. This Grant fellow's probably the biggest dealer in the whole state or something." As usual, after a bit of complaining, he had worked his way to (and then beyond) the real problem.
Marjorie Larson calmly replied: "You knew perfectly well before we came here that some people in this world, including the ones in college, smoke marijuana. As for Grant, didn't his roommate say that the poor kid left because of what they were doing? You're being negative again dear. Cheer up, I'm sure he's a wonderful boy." Neither Marjorie nor her husband alluded to the reasons behind their almost desperate hope that he would be a "wonderful boy", but neither could keep from remembering. Jen was inarguably, involuntarily, indiscriminantly beautiful, and this had caused problems from the moment she hit puberty. Teachers, students, clerks, delivery boys, private tutors, salesmen - no one was immune from the lure. Even when it became known that her father was a crotchety son-of-a-bitch who was aching for a chance to use his shotgun on an over-avid suitor, the thought of delectable teenage flesh tended to drive all worries from the male mind. There had been a lot of little incidents, but thankfully no big ones, and Jen had become soured on the male half of the species. There were exceptions, of course. Not every member of the masculine sex let his testosterone rule his actions, but the combination of her beauty, her strange upbringing, her recent arrival at the school (she had been there for three years, most of the students had been there since kindergarten) and her youth (at sixteen, she was at least two years younger than most of her classmates) made finding friends a rare occurrence.
Hence the interest of the entire family in Grant, as Jay had realized. When a male appeared (in a certain abstract sense, through his words) in Jen's life, a male who had (glory be to God) NEVER MET HER, a male who was willing to talk to her, and seemed to care not a whit for what she looked like, it had been manna from the heavens for the Larson family. It was a shot in the arm for Jen's ailing self-confidence, which had been forced to conclude that because no one cared about her intelligence or her personality, she must be lacking in both respects. Her parents certainly weren't planning table settings for the wedding, but they both (her mother enthusiastically, her father reluctantly) thought a nice, normal relationship with someone who cared about Jen as a person was just what she needed. Someone like Grant.
To Grant, his lucid moments were few and far between, dimly lit service stations amidst an ocean of black desert. Fortunately, this was because his good stretches were so much shorter, subjectively, than his stoned ones - in reality he was doing fairly well. Thus it was that Grant saw the Larsons entering the library, and threw himself into his role. He looked studiously at the book in front of him, murmured occasionally, and then shook his head as though he found it difficult to believe that something so obviously wrong could make its way into print. As the Larsons picked him out of the scattered crowd ("Is that him?" "I believe so" "Then what are you waiting for, come on!") and walked towards him, he mumbled things like "Of course", "Well, that's obvious", and "It took them two pages to explain that?" Just as they reached him, Grant threw out one of his favorites: "What mail-order diploma mill gave this bozo a PhD?" Mr. Larson cleared this throat, and Grant glanced up, trying to look intellectual and distracted. The sight of Jennifer Larson quickly turned Grant's distraction from act to reality as he took in the scenic vista before him. Holy Shit, what a body! Should he say something? Greet her by name? Should he be expected to recognize her or not? If not, saying something might be a faux pas, a "false step" in French. Wait, why would he step in French? He'd never learned to speak the language, let alone use it to perambulate. Before Grant resolved either his dilemma or his tangential train of thought, the point was rendered academic by Mr. Larson's introduction:
"Hi. Sorry to disturb your studying, but I'm Jack Larson, this is my wife Marjorie, and, uh, I believe you already know our daughter Jennifer. We happened to be kinda near the University, and figured we'd stop by and see if you were free for dinner." He waited with an expectant, hopeful air.
"Hi. Uh, sure, I'm free. I was just studying a little, uh..." Grant glanced down at the book he was holding. Fortunately it was of the type that had its title printed at the top of each page. This one was apparently called The Perils of Repression: Sexual Dysfunctionalism in Victorian England. Damn, he'd already told Jen that his two humanities classes this semester were Cars & Culture and Modern Music: The Sixties. He continued: "...for...well, its directed reading. I wasn't expecting...I mean, not that I mind..." Grant's voice trailed off into an awkward silence. This personality was fine for waiting, but no good at talking. Alright, enough with the bookworm, time to be the silky smooth charmer who enthralled parents and fascinated women. He cleared his throat, and said, in a beguiling tone:
"Sorry, I've been distracted. I have a bit of a headache - its been a rough week. Actually, I've been a little sick too - an ear infection. Nothing serious. Its a pleasure to meet the both of you, charmed to make your acquaintance, absolutely charmed. I'm Grant Baxter, of course. And the lovely Jennifer, even more beautiful than I imagined, but that is as it should be, for truly no mortal imagination could conceive of such exquisite perfection." The line was a little awkward, but it was delivered with flair and sincerity, which Grant had long since discovered was the most important characteristic in a compliment. Unfortunately, the Larsons did not seem the least bit impressed.. In fact, a distinct impression of distaste flitted briefly across Jen's face. How could he have gone so wrong already? Think boy, think! Most women, even the best looking ones, loved being told how beautiful they were, especially in Grant's characteristically erudite style. But there were some who were extremely self-conscious, and hated having their appearance remarked upon - Grant had run into them before. What to say to fix things?
He took Jennifer Larson's left hand, looked her in the eye, leaned forward slightly, and said, in a soft voice that was a definite contrast from the cheery tone of his greeting: "Sorry, I get like that when I've been reading for too long. I want everything to sound like it came out of a book. And being nervous makes it even worse." A distinct expression of happiness and relief crossed her face, and he dropped her hand and turned towards her parents, disposing of the tiny ephemeral space he had just created for the two of them. "Let me check this out, and we can go."
The student behind the circulation desk was an acquaintance, and as Grant approached the desk, he sniffed the air and said "Shame shame Grant, you been hittin' the pipe again?". Grant shot him a quick "Be Quiet You Idiot" look, and as he placed the book and his student ID on the desk murmured "Shh! Damn you Phil!...uh...say you were kidding, you know I don't smoke, ask if Jay's using my room for that again. hurry up!" Grant made a quick head motion towards the waiting family, and as Phil's eyes traveled up and down the sixteen year old spectacle, he understood, and said in a loud conversational tone: "Just kidding buddy, I know you ain't down with the Rasta. Has that bastard roommate of yours been smoking up the room again? You don't gotta take that crap, you know. Make him go somewhere else. The fucker." He added in an undertone "You owe me one. Next time you smoke, gimme a ring."
At normal volume, Grant said "I hear you, that stuff just isn't cool. I'll be seeing you." With a wink to emphasize the double meaning of his last statement, Grant picked up the book and his ID and turned back towards the Larsons. "Shall we?" The four left the library, and headed back towards Grant's dorm, where their car was parked. As they walked, they split up naturally by age, Grant and Jen dropping a few paces behind the married couple. He whispered "What are you doing here? I mean, not that I mind, but its kind of a shock." She replied "Sorry, it was dad's idea. He is soooo paranoid. I guess he just wanted to make sure you were alright. I mean, you are the first guy I've gotten to know who he's never met, or heard of, or anything." She looked at him and smiled, an action which transformed her face from an abstract landscape, beautiful in a distant, remote way, to a personal, focused beauty that made Grant want to melt like a Hersheys bar in a pants pocket. As they strolled through campus, the two talked and joked, and Grant found himself loosening up. He felt comfortable with Jen, as he did with so few people, like he could doff all masks and just be himself, whatever that was. But her parents were there, and he had lied to all of them, and he had to keep the act going. There was no getting off the tiger. Out of the blue, Grant Baxter was struck with a strange, inexplicable realization, one that suddenly coalesced from the void that was his real personality, hidden deep beneath layers of obscurity: that he did not want to cause Jennifer Larson pain.
This was a realization of a type he had rarely encountered, and Grant spent most of the way to the car and restaurant pondering it. Jen's parents made a few comments and asked a few questions, but Grant was still able to spend most of his effort on introspection. His chameleon-like personality had stood him well, but its flip side was instability. The one person he had never succeeded in analyzing was himself. In those few, unguarded moments when he was alone, he sometimes tried to peel away all the layers, reach the soft part at the middle that really mattered. But all he had ever found was a void, a humming black box that rarely spoke but had to be listened to. Something in Jen's innocent trust had touched that ebony oblong, reached past all his defenses to flip a switch which Grant had never noticed, and suddenly an LED had powered on, glowing amber in the cavernous darkness of his soul. Amidst the dim light, Grant realized how dingy a space it was, blackened with the ashes of countless joints, littered with the shards of shattered bottles, sticky with the encrusted blood from a handful of broken hearts. There were bright spots, of course, but in his current mood he ignored the triumphs, scanned past the samaritan deeds, looking for the pain and anguish he needed to become indignant at himself. He considered his main cover personality and realized how shallow it must look to the world. It was him, but it was nowhere near all of him.
For a moment, Grant considered crafting a new self, pondered who and what it would be, how he would make people realize he was different. A few cosmetic adjustments, maybe cut his hair and start wearing glasses instead of contacts again...but he quickly realized how futile such an action would be. He didn't want a new improved mask, he wanted to be himself, but hadn't the least clue who that was. His masks had been built from himself, molded to fit his face, he had strong ties to each - in a way, they represented aspects of his personality. He could not avoid them, almost everything he did came from one of them. Perhaps if he could reconcile them a little more, start to blend them, rather than keeping them so rigidly distinct. Thanks to Jen, he had moved a step closer to understanding himself. From his new perspective, he realized what an asshole he had been. But he was still stuck on the tiger. He had lied, and the lies would not go away.
Grant faked his way through dinner fairly well - when his attention wandered, his "sinus infection" was a perfect excuse to ask for a statement to be repeated. He was charming and suave, and did his best to keep the conversation away from topics like his upbringing, and towards things like the weather, the quality of food, and the endless stupidity of politicians. He lied when necessary, without hesitation, elaboration, or pleasure, but the knowledge that every falsehood he told was another brick in the wall between he and Jen. He could feel it growing throughout the meal, sprouting tangles of barbed wire, growling at him with sharpened steel teeth. It had a feedback-like effect on his personality - the higher the wall, the less he cared about Jen, the more his mask thickened. The person that had opened up over e-mail, that lurked behind his defenses, was appalled by his deceit, frightened by the inevitable consequences, and too new and scared to do anything about it. It refused to have any part in the proceedings, and Grant was stuck in a bitter, painful paradox, ala Groucho Marx and his club: The only personality that would resonate with Jen was a personality that refused to continue lying to her, and he was not willing to tell the truth.
By the time the check arrived, Grant was almost back to his standard suck-up-to-parents personality. In addition, much of his tetrahydracannibinol induced daze had passed - although things were not yet normal he was securely in control of his thought processes. As expected, the Larson parents thought he was charming and respectful. Perhaps a bit odd, a little flamboyant, and that long hair - but that was `in' nowadays, wasn't it? Mr. Larson's initial suspicions still hadn't been completely allayed, but nothing short of a deity's intervention would have changed that. The only one who wasn't seem satisfied was Jen. Sure, Grant was charming and all that, but something seemed wrong. He was different, somehow, than the person who she had corresponded with. It seemed an odd thing to think, but over e-mail he was so much more...well, real. In person he was just too flippant, slick, glib, smooth. What had happened to the person who reached out from an ethernet cloud in a sky of network blue and touched her life, the first intelligent man who had taken any kind of interest in her? Was their relationship so fragile and impermanent? Darn her dad for making them come! Maybe if she had waited longer...Jen blinked back a few tears, but her parents were watching one of Grant's restaurant tricks involving improbably balanced silverware, and her emotions went unnoticed.
Grant sensed some of Jen's distress, but as the wall of cinderblock lies grew, it blocked his innate empathy. As they drove back towards the college, he assayed some small talk, tried to make her laugh, but his efforts felt short and he lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. While they parked behind the dorms, Mrs. Larson said to her husband in the unmistakable tone that sounds like a request, but means a command "Why don't we take a walk around the dorms, Jack? Its a wonderful night. Jen can see Grant's dorm, and we'll give them a few minutes to say goodbye." He grunted assent, and the pairs split up. A chance to be alone with the object of his pursuit - it should have been the perfect conclusion to Grant's evening, and would have, before his epiphany. Grant knew how much his room would shock Jen, but couldn't bring himself to care that much. He'd already blown things, from the way she was acting, and there was no easy way to fix them. His only chance was to come clean, admit it all, and hope she would understand. And if she didn't, so what? Who the fuck cared? Even as he asked the rhetorical question, his black box spit out the simple, obvious, damning answer: he cared. You do not want to hurt Jennifer Larson.
Fortunately Jay was not around (having, perhaps, anticipated the need to be absent), so Grant would have no audience but Jen for what he envisioned as an inspired, heart-wrenching, tearful confession. Yeah, he'd do it good. As they walked through the halls to his room, he planned his strategy: It had started out as a joke, but become serious. He didn't know when to stop lying. He really cared about her. He was very sorry. He'd never lie to her again. The truth, basically, just dressed up a bit and made pretty. When they reached his door, he turned to her, and said "My room is a little...different. You may be a bit surprised, but I can explain everything, trust me." With those final two optimistic words, he opened his door, and the two walked in. Jen was presented with a scene that Grant had carefully crafted to convey to the world who and what he was. Well, who and what he thought he was. A set of wooden shelves held a dazzling array of alcoholic beverages, as well as three or four bongs ranging in size from a few inches to a few feet. Posters bedecked the walls: This is Your Brain on Drugs (the famous egg frying pictures), Safety can be Fun (displaying dozens of exotic kinds of condoms), psychedelic swirls of multicolored fractals (some obviously designed for black light viewing), a huge SGI logo, a voluptuous scantily clad woman tied to a bed with the caption "Sorry I can't come to the phone, but I'm all tied up right now". The beds were bunked, and the bottom was Grant's. It had flannel sheets, satin pillowcases, and at each corner, a pair of padded leather restraints was attached to the post. A coffee table sat in the center of the room, littered with an odd selection of magazines: Wired, Sega Power, Playboy, Byte, 2600, Computer Shopper, the Utne Reader.
There were other, subtler signs, that pointed to an interesting, rather than a perverted personality. One wall was almost entirely obscured by bookshelves. A Jacob's ladder and a plasma ball sat in one corner hooked up to a high voltage power supply, generating a flickering visual display. A set of juggling clubs hung from the ceiling. There were several art posters, some Magritte's, a Monet, lots of Escher. The room was a sensory overload.
Jen took in the spectacle slowly, peering in corners, reading book titles, while confusion grew on her lovely face like rainclouds gathering over a mountain range. She finally turned towards the person she thought she knew and summed up all her feelings with a single tremulous statement:
"I don't understand."
Grant had used the classic "My roommates a bit wierd, sorry." before to good effect, but that would not do now. His thoughts ran in circles, there had to be some way out of this, some perfect line. He hated to drop an act, he hated to eat his words, he HATED to lose. But there was no solution, no other way to reconcile the conflicting equations of belief and desire. The only way to get off the tiger was to take a flying leap and hope against hope you could sweet-talk it out of mauling you. He took a deep breath, and said something he hadn't said in a long time:
"I...I haven't been...entirely truthful with you."
She took it with a poise that belied her age, sat down on his bed, acknowledging his admittal only with a defensive fold of her arms, and said:
"Explain."
The story started as he had planned, he was just going to have some fun, but he started really enjoying the correspondence. But as he listened to his voice - the words ringing dead and hollow, the facts tripping on each other as he tried to justify himself - the realization that the two people he was talking about were here, and that one of them was himself, worked its way through the layers of his mind. He was the star witness at his own court-martial, and as the damning flood of evidence poured forth, he began to halt and stammer. Why didn't she say anything, dammit? Cry, or scream, or get mad, or...just something! But she sat, silent, immobile, her features calm, no bitter stream of invective coming from her soft mouth. The only signs that he had reached her were in her eyes, twin pools of azure pain which drank his confession like hemlock, windows into her soul, betrayed and hurt, frightened and confused, as only the truly innocent can be. Older people, cynical, jaded, fear the worst, expect it. Pain still hurts, but their hearts are encrusted with the betrayal of friends, scarred by the knives of heartbreak, hardened by the harshness of life. Jen had no such defense. She could sense the pain gathering in the pit of her stomach like molten lead, heavy, acrid, and burning, but kept a tight grip on her emotions. Only her eyes showed them.
Grant's diatribe of misinformation and manipulation staggered to an awkward finish, his anguished mouth unable to continue. He tried to start again, but could not. Finally he broke down, and the dammed tears burst forth. For once they were completely real, and his body was wracked with sobs in a way he had never been able to fake. He realized how ludicrous a parody of justice this was - he was the guilty, the damned, the one who had caused this all to happen. How dare he cry, while she sat there unmoved? But the agony of his deceit ignored logic, gave his tears swords, sent them to loot and pillage through his soul. A shuddering mass, he sat down on the bed next to Jen and put his head in his hands as though to block out the world. Betrayed or not, a person was in pain, and Jen could not help her reflexes. She put her arms around the man who had told her nothing but lies and whispered to him that everything was going to be alright. After a time, his sobbing quieted, and he lifted a tear-tracked face to look at his victim and comforter. His lips tasted of salt, he smelled the acrid stink of betrayal, and the sight of Jen triggered another paroxysm of tears. Finally, emptied, he finished crying, and dried his face with his shirt.
In a calmer voice, he began to talk, and for the first time that evening, he sounded like the person she thought she had known. He explained, as best he could, in careful words without apology, and without defending himself, his situation, his motivation, his stupidity, his nature. He talked about masks, about actors, about chameleons, about hopes and desires, about bitterness and hatred, about who he had tried to be, about why he had failed. He knew it would not redeem him, that the damage had been done, but at least he was through with lies.
When he finished, Jen said what he was afraid she would, with a plaintive tone of lost innocence:
"How do I know any of what you say is true? How do I know you aren't just saying this for my benefit? How can I ever trust you again?"
He gave the only logical reply:
"You can't know. There is no reason for you to trust me. I'm sorry that I lied, but that cannot and should not be enough. I've been a jerk, and you would be an idealistic fool to give me the chance to do it again."
Jen sighed, wishing the awful night would end. The tears waited inside her, clamoring to be released. They could be stalled, but not forever. How had things gone so wrong? She could never trust anyone again. But all her instincts clamored that the pain beside her was real, that Grant was hurt, and she so badly wanted it to be true. She wanted things to be better, she wanted to be happy, she wanted to understand the world again. But the hurt was too fresh, and forgiveness, if it ever came, was certainly not going to come now. She looked at him and said:
"Please don't e-mail me anymore. When...If...If I'm ever ready, I'll write you. For now - stay out of my life."
Grant nodded, defeated, and at that propitious moment, they heard the voices of Jen's parents approaching. He wondered whether they had been listening, but nothing really mattered now. Jen turned and left without another word, leaving her final request hanging in the air, dripping with heartbreak and broken shards of trust. Grant closed his door, and surveyed his room, looking for comfort. He assembled an unlikely collection of items: a teddy bear, a bottle of wine, and a book of Dorothy Parker poetry, took them over to his bed, and settled down to hate himself to sleep.
Last Modified: September 8th, 1998
Patri Friedman / patri@izzy.com